INCREASED AERIAL DENSITY CAPABILITY IN STORAGE DRIVES USING ENCODED DATA PORTIONS WRITTEN TO MEDIA SURFACES WITH DIFFERENT AERIAL DENSITY CAPABILITIES

Optimization of an aerial density capability (ADC) leveraging different qualities of media surfaces to which sub-portions of an encoded data portion are written. That is, data may be encoded to generate an encoded data portion according to a coding scheme. In turn, the encoded data portion may be divided into a plurality of sub-portions, each of which may be written to different media surfaces in a storage drive. The sub-portions may be read from the different media surfaces and combined to generate a recreated encoded data portion that is decoded using the coding scheme. As the encoded data portion is divided into sub-portions, the combined sub-portions may provide different error rates or signal-to-noise ratios that may allow for lower quality sub-portions to be assisted during the decoding process by higher quality sub-portions.